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BGonline.org Forums
Editing or pasting positions with cube in GnuBG
Posted By: MK In Response To: Editing or pasting positions with cube in GnuBG (Stick)
Date: Monday, 15 June 2026, at 8:27 a.m.
> I don't think hardly anyone is still paying money for XG. We got our licenses decades ago and once you have it, you have it.
There are always newcomers and XG is being recommended as "the" bot to get in all kinds of forums, social media and BG associations.
>About a month or so ago there was this email that a lot of people received noting that XG had been sold about a year ago. Hopefully there is something in the pipeline but there's not much to do other than wait and see.
It's old news. For the ones who had not heard it back then, see this thread from April 2025.
https://www.bgonline.org/forums/webbbs_config.pl?read=215808
Personally I never expected that anything worthwhile would come out of it. One+ year later it's still waporware...
It would be interesting to know if the guy ever felt a "buyer's remorse", like I had wondered in this old thread:
https://www.bgonline.org/forums/webbbs_config.pl?read=216320
> How is it you figure XG is an 'obsolete product'? By definition it isn't as there is nothing out that has overtaken it.
I strongly disagree that this is the definition of "obsolete". There are million things that were the best of their time but have become obsolete even if not replaced by something better.
And what "overtaken" means? In what way? In playing strength? In features and functions? In speed? In popularity? Etc.? What if GnuBG or BgBzzzt is actually a better bot in many aspects except speed but never overtook XG in market share because their developers didn't know how to rub butts with the right people...?
> There may be little nit picky things that come up but I haven't heard of any real issues, have you?
Some of those "little nit picky things" are actually very irritating because they occur several times, in almost every game, like its not knowing when it has zero chance of winning and failing to resign, etc.
But I'm not talking about those. I'm not going to argue that "real issues" may be different things depending on what purposes a person uses the bot for.
All I want is something better than an "obsolete" bot. Just like Jellyfish, Snowie, GnuBG, BgBzzzt, etc. XG was already obsolete when it was created, simply for being a mismutated offspring of TD-Gammon, that was developed on 20th century (now obsolete) hardware and 20th century programming languages and AI techniques, not to mention the usage of obsolete bullshit like jackoffski cube formulas and match equity tables which should have been abandoned decades ago, just like XG was abandoned a decade ago... Phew, that was a long sentence.
After TD-Gammon v.1 was praised as the first AI bot without any human bias, G. Tesauro inserted all sorts of human bias into TD-Gammon v.2 and caused an immense, irreversible damage to BG AI development by steering the entire herd in the wrong direction, just because of his bot was a "subjective success" against a small batch of certain types of gamblegammon "giants".
I wrote a dozen articles about this, including urging people to try to put him and IBM to shame for what they caused and to ask them to redeem themselves by going back to starting over from TD-Gammon v.1 and doing it right this time taking advantage of the thousand fold computing power we now have, along with today's programming and AI techniques.
Having said that, the new owner of XG being a billionaire(??), maybe he can afford to do what IBM could but most likely will never do, and will give us a truely modern BG bot by recreating from scratch at least the AI part of XG. Now, that's something I would like to see happen and would pay for but I won't be holding my breath...
MK
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